Hybrid Car Lithium Batteries

The thing that makes a car a hybrid car is its use of dual technology. At the moment almost all hybrid cars use a combination of a gas or diesel engine and an electric motor. The energy for most of these motors is generated from the hybrid cars engine and stored in the batteries. There is however a slight difficulty with this system: the battery. The batteries that are commonly used in hybrid cars are still very similar to the standard car batteries that have been in use for great many years.

While these batteries were adequate to power the normal requirements of your average car, such as starter motor, lights, air conditioning, etc. They are not powerful enough to drive the electric motor of the new hybrid cars. The new hybrid cars that are actually driven in part by their electric motors need a far greater source of energy. Traditional batteries are simply not powerful enough.

This shortfall has, in the past, been made up by simply using larger amounts of batteries to increase the power available in hybrid cars. However this solution has, although practical in the short term, provided its own set of problems. The power needed to drive the hybrid cars electric motor meant that a large number of batteries were needed and this meant increased weight and cost.

The extra weight of these meant more load had to be pulled by the cars motor (whether gas or electric) and this led to increased fuel consumption, either to drive the engine or to provide electricity for the motor. This of course, in part at least, defeated the object of using the electric motor, which was to cut fuel costs. Also large amounts of batteries are expensive to buy and, given the limited longevity of most batteries, to replace, which all adds to both the initial cost and the maintenance of the vehicle.

The main hope for improving this situation for hybrid cars lies with lithium batteries. These are the same batteries that are currently used to power laptops and cameras. They provide a much more concentrated and therefore smaller way of storing energy as electricity. If developed to their full potential they could provide a long term solution to the problem of providing sufficient electric power to make hybrid cars a more practical solution to low cost, low emission motoring.